i remember there was a diode and transistor that were literally completely seperated from the traces of the rest of the chip, and yet they were functional pieces and the chip wouldnt work if you removed them.

If that was true they would be getting the Nobel in physics for discovering some incredible new quantum phenomena, it would be front-page news everywhere. I highly doubt it's true.

Frustratingly, that article you linked doesn't actually link to the paper. But it is in Nature Communications. That's a respectable journal but not that prestigious, and it publishes a lot of over hyped stuff. Not that any journal doesn't. But if they had really found new physics with AI chip design that would go to Science, Nature, or maybe PRL.

Edit: ah, I found it.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-54178-1

Chip design isn't at all my specialty so take my opinion about this with a grain of salt. But I think it's notable that

Prior works in nanophotonics have demonstrated the class of inverse methods for specific dielectric-based passive structures through gradient based optimizations such as adjoint method

So, there are already known algorithmic approaches to solving for these. I think it's also notable that these are for signal transformation and antennae, relatively simple operations.

This seems like a vaguely useful result but I don't expect it'll be breaking any new ground any time soon.